Frank Moore

Between Life & Death

by Frank Moore

Amazon.com Review

Science and nature live in a sometimes indelicate balance in the rueful, sexual, and often disturbing work of American artist Frank Moore, who died in New York City in April 2002 on the cusp of worldwide acclaim. Between Life & Death is the breathtaking, oversized first monograph on the life's work of this artist who battled AIDS (and often the medical establishment) for 20 years.

Moore had a lifelong interest in art and science, but it was his exploration into surrealism while on a long residency in Paris that truly informed his art, allowing these divergent images to coexist so harmoniously. The increasing devastation of the worldwide AIDS crisis throughout the 1980s profoundly and irrevocably changed Moore's life as well as his work. Personal losses began to affect his work: health and ecology merged as a triumphant theme in most of these 73 paintings, many of which can be seen in some of the world's most important museums and galleries.

Beautifully designed and printed, Between Life & Death is a fitting tribute to this artist who both painted about his time and pointed to problems of our time. As Robert Glück writes in his foreword, "Wonder can be a form of activism. Moore develops a language of wonder, foursquare, wide-eyed. He paints his subjects with a highly controlled palette: the modulation of warm and cool blues. Mary's mantle is the blue of contemplation; Der Blaue Reiter is the blue of mystical nature; Miles Davis's Kind of Blue is a still lake of sound. I think Moore's blue is the color of our dear planet, our bright organism, a blue of compassion and wonder." --Charles Decker

Publisher's Description

BETWEEN LIFE & DEATH
FRANK MOORE
TEXT BY ROBERT GLUCK

'Say I live in a Frank Moore painting. The difference
between my life and death would be a distinction only
on one level. From the point of view of the countless
viral particles, fungal spores, and bacteria that swarm
in each breath I take and across every surface I touch,
my death might be as incidental as some exploding
nova would be to me as I write this. Or my death might
equal the extinction of an entire species.... There is no
distinction between my social life and the earth's other
events. 'I am nature,' said Jackson Pollock. Frank Moore
says, 'New York is a glittering multicelled, accreted
structure-as much an expression of our species as a
coral reef is an expression of coral polyps.'
-Robert Gluck

In 1977 Frank Moore took a freighter from Montreal
to Santander, Spain. He traveled through Spain,
France, and Morocco, finally settling in Paris, where
he obtained a residency in the Cite des Arts. Upon
his return to New York, Moore began a decade-long
involvement with modern dance, theater, film, and
video that paralleled his development as a painter.
The increasing devastation of the AIDS crisis through
the eighties profoundly and irrevocably transformed
his life and work. His work was included in the 1995
Whitney Biennial and is included in the collections
of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern
Art, and the Albright Knox Art Gallery.